Issue #9546 has been updated by John Julien.
Capturing a discussion from the mailing list on this topic. There were 3
questions discussed about the implementation of this feature, see the details
below.
Question 1: What is the justification for this feature? Why is it needed?
Right now if a person is using an external fact that is fully puppet controlled
they are creating a file resource in Puppet to get it to the client. This
means the fact won't actually be available during the catalog compile until the
2nd Puppet run. It usually causes errors in the 1st Puppet run or undesired
behavior around the portion of code that requires that fact. This is a clumsy
implementation.
Many people using Puppet are sysadmins who all are very familiar with shell,
probably some python and perl in there too. Ruby is not as common of a
language in the sysadmin tool box. Allowing users to write facts in a language
they already know brings Puppet one step closer to a level people already
understand which increases the adoption rate.
Question 2: Where will the external facts reside in the module path?
The external facts will reside in a facts/ directory at the base of the module.
So an example tree would be:
mymodule
├── facts
│ └── my_external_fact.sh
├── lib
│ └── facter
│ └── custom_ruby_fact.rb
└── manifests
└── init.pp
Question 3: Will there be a way to confine which facts are synchronized to what
hosts for compatibility reasons?
Several suggestions were made and discussed at length.
1. Sync all facts to all clients and fail silently if a fact could not be
evaluated
2. Have a folder structure based on kernel type that would sync facts to hosts
with kernels matching the directory name
3. Have an optional ".confine" file for each fact that uses s-exrpessions to
define a list of conditions that would have to be met for the fact to be
synchronized. The conditions would be based on other already existing facts
4. Take a simplified approach to number 3 and have the confine only evaluate
equality of values for existing facts. So "osfamily: RedHat" would be allowed,
but no regex or && or || operators.
5. Adjust Facter to not execute files with extensions [exe, com, bat] on unix
systems (Currently these are the only extensions executed on Windows). Sync
all facts to all systems. Cross platform compatibilty is up to the programmer
of the fact to fail silently if need be by returning nil or perform different
operations depending on the OS it is being run on.
The discussion concluded that 1 was too passive, 2-4 were too complex, so 5 was
the best option.
The full details of the conversation can be found here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/puppet-dev/jKgqWO0y4H0
----------------------------------------
Feature #9546: Plugin sync support for external facts
https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/9546#change-98657
* Author: Ken Barber
* Status: Accepted
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee:
* Category: interface
* Target version:
* Keywords: external facts
* Branch:
* Affected Facter version:
----------------------------------------
So now we have external facts (#2157) we would want to be able to synchronise
these somehow using pluginsync.
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